Alien Nine: Destroyer
by Daviot
Summary: Shortly after the events of Emulators, a young girl wages a personal, impossible battle. There’s a rumor among the aliens of a human known as the “Destroyer”, a person who’s managed to kill hundreds of them despite being an ordinary human.
1. Operation Ex0: Prologue, End of Eras

**Alien Nine: Destroyer**

**Operation Ex0: Prologue—End of Eras**

—Heisei 27—  
"To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think."

"To fight the unbeatable foe  
To bear with unbearable sorrow  
To run where the brave dare not go."  
At the time, way back when, scholars and Buddhist monks designated the year 1052, at the end of the Heian, to be the start of _mappo_—the end of eras. A time of darkness when men would forget the dharma and would be unable to achieve enlightenment. An era when the truth would be known to only a few and no one would believe them when they spoke it. Well, 1052 came and went. I figured mappo to be a myth, and if it wasn't a myth, then it would be like the Second Coming—something never happening in _my_ lifetime. Well, I finally realized. We're living in mappo, the end of eras. It started in 1998.

—Jun'ko Shinosaki


	2. Operation Ex1: Jun

**Operation Ex1: Jun**

For Yuri Otani, life was hell. Sometimes every day, but at least on a weekly basis. As she sat in her desk awaiting the start of homeroom, she dreaded the day. "_This sucks. I hope there aren't any aliens today. That'd just make my day easier._" "Hey, perk up, Yuri!" Yuri lifted her head to see the face and curls of Miyu Tamaki, her only "normal" friend. "Aren't you at least glad to be in class B, now? I heard you did awesome on your mid-terms." It was true, of course, that there was a silver lining to the events of the past couple of months. Despite having Kasumi literally go crazy and Kumi _actually_ die (and almost getting merged with an alien herself), she did get an email from them. Apparently, Kumi had somehow been resurrected (though Yuri wasn't keen on the details) and the two were going to be staying in California for the time being. "_Great._"

After that, she was still a member of the much-beleaguered and underfunded alien fighters of Hinode Junior High, despite wanting no part of it. At least with good mid-term scores and a lot of prodding from Monami (she was a senior after all; that, and the position of alien fighter was technically equivalent in level to a member of the student council) and Miss Hisakawa (who had been temporarily sent to help them, but since returned to Elementary School 9), she had been bumped up to class B, with her friend Miyu.

"Guess what? I've got two, juicy big rumors!" Miyu held out her right hand in a V, indicating the number for her half-dazed friend. She smiled in front of her blond curls. "What is it?" "Well, first is, I heard that Miss Hisakawa got fired." Yuri frowned. "Fired?" Miyu nodded. "Yep. They say that Miss Okada replaced her with a new Alien Party advisor, after all the stuff that happened." "Oh." Despite not knowing whether to fully trust her former advisor, the news was somewhat disheartening. "_But_, this school just opened a new slot for a counselor, so everybody thinks she's going to apply for it." Yuri nodded. "Okay. What was the other one?" Her friend grinned. "There's a new student. A transfer student to Class B. No one knows anything about him…or her. All the girls are hoping for a hottie, and I overheard Namiki and his friends joking about wanting a girlfriend. So, we'll just have to wait and see." Just as Miyu had intended, Yuri had caught the bait and forgotten her dread of the day's possible duties.

"So, when's this person joining our class?" "Right now." Yuri hoped the new student was a girl; except for Miyu she didn't know anyone in Class B, so making a friend seemed like a good thing. "All rise!" The student's representative's voice indicated the entrance of their teacher, Mr. Masuda. The bespectacled man cleared his throat. "Good morning, class. As you may have heard, we have a new student this morning. Please welcome her to Class B." At the sound of "her", the previously silent class erupted in a slew of whispers. Masuda-sensei turned towards the door. "Come in, please." Yuri could not totally see from where she was sitting, but watched as the person walked in to the middle of the class room, and immediately turned right and picked up the chalk. From the back, the new student looked like a boy—she was wearing the same slacks as the boys, as well as a long-sleeved uniform jacket (with the standard issue brown school bag on her back) that Yuri had never seen before. Her hair was a reddish-brown that Otani assumed to be natural. It was cut short, almost square, along the back. The clacks of chalk finally stopped.

篠  
崎  
純  
子

"_Shinosaki…Junko_." The girl swiveled on her loafers to face the class. Further gasps arose from the peanut gallery. The new student was…_different_ than what people were expecting. With her face, her short, boyish haircut, and a small but not entirely nonexistent bust, she might have had a sort of cuteness to her…maybe. Any cuteness that she might have had was overshadowed by her facial features. Shinosaki had rather imposing-looking steel grey irises set in rather sharp eyes. There was a large, linear scar that went vertically from her forehead through her left eyelid to her cheek, where it met a horizontal cicatrix running beneath her left eyelid. There was also extensive scarring on her chin along with what looked to be the remains of large gashes through her left ear and on the right side of her neck. The net effect was that Junko Shinosaki appeared as if she had come fresh from a war zone.

"My name is Junko Shinosaki. I go by Jun. Age, 13. I'm now in class 1-B. Pleased to make your acquaintances." The alto voice matched her appearance. Jun went into a rather curt bow before she straightened herself and took a deep breath, running a gloved hand through her hair. "_That was awkward._" Although she was wearing the standard "sailor" blouse, Jun was wearing the navy slacks out of the boy's uniform, along with a matching uniform jacket that Jun hadn't seen anyone else wearing. However, the combination was school-approved if not awkward and she had gotten affirmation of it earlier that morning when she had talked with the principal.

After an uncomfortable silence, Mr. Masuda asked, "Are there any questions for Miss Shinosaki?" A brief pause ensued before a girl raised her hand. "What school did you attend previously?" Jun's darted back and forth in thought momentarily. "I was home-schooled. Before that, I attended Elementary School 26, out in the country." The teacher frowned. "Never heard of it." "It closed down a while back." "I see." Another hand went up. "What are your hobbies?" Jun grinned. "Surviving." The class went into a confused silence. "Sorry. Just a joke. Let's see…I like reading…some athletics, and I do a bit of scientific research sometimes. You know, on my own…for fun."

"Do you have someone you're seeing?" Jun squinted as she raised her right eyebrow. The now grinning young man subtly straightened his tie. "Um…no…" Miyu raised her hand. "Yes?" "Aren't you hot in that jacket?" "Not really." "What dorm building are you going to be in?" "I actually live around here, so I'm not in a dorm." Namiki was next. "How come you're wearing gloves? What's up with that?" Jun's hands, which had previously been hidden almost behind her, went back to her sides. At the end of her jacket's sleeves were extremely thin white leather gloves. "Oh, these? I was in an accident was I was a kid, and my hands were really badly burned." Jun lowered her voice. "It's kind of embarrassing." "Oh, sorry." "It's okay."

A few more questions were answered, before Jun addressed Masuda-sensei. "Sir, can I ask you a question?" "Certainly." "Just for my reference…are there any class officers in here?" Masuda sifted through some papers. "Let's see…Miss Hirano, she's in the first row, is our student council representative, and…Miss Otani is in the Alien Party." "Thanks. Where may I sit?" "I believe there's an open desk behind Miss Tamaki, isn't there?" Jun nodded, walked over to the desk in question, took off her bag, and sat down. She scooted her chair in, leaned her bag against the leg of the desk, and sighed. "Now class, I'm afraid that we've gone two minutes over on homeroom, so I'll have to speed up a little. Now, as we know…" Yuri looked at the new student momentarily before she turned her attention to the lecture. "_She sounds like me…a little._"

• • •

A couple of periods later, Class 1-B found itself around the room-sized oval-shaped table that dominated their Lab class. "Hey." The recipient of the interjection ignored. "Shinosaki?" Jun turned her head left, and noticed the girl sitting across from her. "Yes?" "You said you were good at science, right? Could you come here for a second?" Jun got up from her seat and walked around the edge of the table.

"Did you see that?" Miyu prodded Yuri in the arm. "See what?" "I think something's wrong with the new girl's eyes. She didn't notice Ayame until her head was practically sideways." When Jun returned, Miyu got up, went over to the new girl and questioned her. "Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but is something wrong with your left eye? Like, is your vision in it really bad or something?" Jun sighed. "_Are these people _always_ this observant of the 'new kid'?_" Jun clicked her pen shut, turned her chair towards Miyu, and without further warning, used her right hand to hold her eyelids open before striking her left eye with the closed tip of the pen. Miyu cringed. Tink. Jun then tapped her eye with her gloved finger. "I don't _have_ a left eye. This one's fake, so yes, I'm blind in my left eye. Are you done?" Miyu nodded quickly. "Yes. Sorry to pester you." Jun sighed. "_What a day_."

• • •

Lunch period came entirely too late for Jun. Rather than go through the hassle of buying something off the lunch line, she had made her own bento lunch earlier that morning. She had found a tree on the edge of campus, eaten her lunch, set her watch, and taken a nap. She had, however, woken up roughly five minutes before her alarm.

"_What?_" Jun woke up groggily only to find her vision dark; she felt fatigued and her neck felt especially strained. Then she heard what sounded like a gurgled shriek from immediately in front of her. It snapped her to clarity. Jun placed a hand just in front of her face. It was stopped a foot in front of her by something mildly soft. Jun fumbled around on the ground for her school bag. She opened it, dug into the bottom, and removed a small cylindrical object. She unscrewed the lid off of the syringe and primed the autoinjector. Jun quickly found an appropriate location on her neck. A quiet hissing emanated from the unit as the internal spring engaged.

Twenty seconds later, there was another screech, followed by a feeling that was a distinct combination of an IV being carelessly yanked out and waxing strips being ripped off dry skin. The basketball-sized object on Jun's face tilted and fell off onto the hard dirt in front of her. "_A Jane._" The parasitic alien quivered before it gave its version of a scream. As Jun felt the eight welts on her forehead where its tendrils had been moments before (which weren't bleeding but were leaking a clear fluid), the alien started _melting_. Starting at the tendrils, the Jane's flesh crinkled and turned to a soup of green blood and fluid, visibly dissolving at a seemingly impossible rate. In a few seconds, all that was left was an empty husk and a pool of liquid. Jun touched her face again. The welts had closed and because of the way a Jane separated its victim's skin she probably would not be able to even find the welts at the end of the day. Either way, it had drained enough out of her that she felt wiped. "Damn thing." Jun capped and put the now-empty autoinjector syringe back in her bag, before returning the bag to her back and returning in the direction of the school.


	3. Operation Ex2: Hatred

**Operation Ex2: Hatred**

"Moshi moshi." "Good evening Megumi." Megumi Hisakawa wrinkled her lip as she sat on a pillow in her apartment. She had previously been staring at her last paycheck from Elementary School 9, when the phone rang. It was Chisa Okada, principal of the aforementioned. "You've got some nerve calling me after giving me the pink slip, Chisa." "I've told you Megumi. It wasn't my decision to remove you from the staff." "Oh, so whose decision was it?" "The school board, along with a representative from the Committee. I told them they were overreacting and that the burden on an Alien Party Advisor doesn't come close to that of an ordinary teacher, but they wouldn't have any part of it. Have you heard about the job opening at Hinode?" "Yes." "Good. I've already talked with Mr. Noda and I've put in my recommendation for you." "Thanks, Okada." Megumi paused for a moment in thought. "Say, have you heard anything from the Committee as far as getting a new borg?" "Well, they seem to think that a person who manages to be responsible for the deaths of two fully integrated symbiotes and who steals another host's borg doesn't need one for a while." "I didn't kill them! The first time, it was that female full-spec, and the second time, it was Miss Tomine." "I know. Notice I didn't say _killed_. They were more concerned about when you took _my_ borg. Anyway, you're on indefinite suspension until they decide otherwise." "Great." "My suggestion, Megumi: get some sleep and call Hinode about an interview."

• • •

"Hey, Shinosaki, do you live around here?" Jun looked at Saki Rin, another student from class B who had left the school moments before she did, who had apparently noticed their common direction. "Yeah, my aunt and uncle's house is a few blocks away." "That's cool. How was your second day of school?" "It was fine." Saki pushed back her black bangs and adjusted her socks as they passed a bench on the outside of Navel Park. "Shinosaki, do you mind if we stopped and talked a moment?" Jun shrugged. "That's fine. And if you're going to talk to me informally, use my first name." "Fair enough. You're welcome to use my first name if you want. So why'd you transfer to Hinode?" "It was close." "No, I meant why transfer at all? Didn't you say that had been home-schooled? Why switch in the middle of the year?" "I didn't realize that 'at semester' meant to middle of the year to most people." Jun shrugged. "My grandfather had been taking care of me, and after he passed away, my aunt and uncle really didn't have the time for that sort of thing." Jun spied a nearby vending machine nearby and began walking toward it.

"So, what's up with your uniform?" "What about it?" "Well, why the jacket and the slacks?" "I like it." Jun pressed two 100-yen coins into the slot and punched the appropriate button. "What do you want, Saki?" "You're…buying me something?" "Yes." "Juice is fine." Jun pressed the corresponding rectangle, and returned with the beverages, handing Rin her juice. "You just got water?" "Yep." "You know, I bet most people in the class a are bit leery of you. It's just that you're so…so…" "Scarred?" Jun unscrewed the lid on her water. "That's a good way of putting it. But, frankly, I think you're pretty cool." "Thanks." "So, you mentioned what you like…what do you hate?" Jun answered plainly. "Aliens." "No kidding. They say that in terms of gross, aliens have pretty much supplanted things like spiders and reptiles." "No, it isn't like that. I _hate_ them." Saki blinked, taken aback with the emphasis. Jun thought for a moment before changing the subject. "About wearing slacks…there's another reason." Jun grasped the cuffs of the right pant leg and pulled them back. Her legs were fairly sleek and clean-shaven, but where her right kneecap should have been was a curved piece of metal with six rivet-like pins flanking the edges. Another, thin strip of metal behind it seemed to hold it flush with the nearby flesh. "I'm missing my kneecap. This one is a titanium-blend that doesn't react with my immune system. My knee joint is still intact, but the whole front of my knee got shattered in such a way that it couldn't be set. I'm also blind in one eye, because I'm missing my left eye. This one…" Jun pointed at her left iris. "…is fake, watch." Jun held up a gloved index finger in front of her and slowly focused her eyes on the it as she moved her hand laterally. Her left eye stood fixed." Saki blinked before chuckling. "That's kinda cool. It's like you're a big chameleon or that creepy old man from the Harry Potter books." She calmed down before continuing. "Why couldn't you have gotten your knee and eye fixed with cell gel or those other new regenerative things they use?" "Well, when I lost my knee and my eye, they _didn't_ _have_ cell gel. I don't exactly trust the stuff, and besides, cell gel can't regenerative really complicated things like the retina or the brain—the tissue there is pretty much unique."

Saki Rin looked at her watch. "Well, I've got to get going. You're welcome to walk with me." Shortly after she finished speaking, a group of birds scattered skyward as if startled. Jun felt a familiar tingling sensation on the back of her neck. Her face and manner hardened. "Rin, go home. I'll see you later." Jun's eyebrows cinched down as she took her schoolbag off her back and used the top handle like a briefcase. She began walking on the dirt footpath that led further into the forest. Saki managed a broken "okay" before she left, walking unusually quicker than normal.

• • •

SUNFLOWER CLAN INTERNAL REPORT  
EARTH HIVE SECTOR D-10Filed as per orders by symbiont "Kiku Usui"Confirmed Casualties: 7

Today, the squad led by Sub-Directrix for Earth section D-10-S landed in a standard-configuration bio-spaceship. Shortly after landing, the squad was attacked by unknown assailant. Based on the information sent back via internal ship communications by the Sub-Directrix, assailant was confirmed as a human female. Assailant seemed to know vulnerable points in sunflower anatomy. Assailant eliminated entire squad with no known injuries, including the three that were in regenerative cocoons at the time. The Sub-Directrix, before his death, noted that assailant appeared to use "conventional human weapons" and "did not appear to be using a borg or other known symbiont type". This is unfounded and statistically impossible. Since we do not control sub-section 10, assailant was most likely allied with local drill clan activities. Assailant seemed unusually violent and aggressive, but appears to be too logical and focused to be under control of a full-spec borg. I have indicated that perhaps assailant may be the first recorded example of a "full-spec human". Regardless, the hive has classified assailant as a D-class threat and if assailant continues further anti-clan activities, threat-level will be raised to that equivalent of a borg "Aggressor"-class alien. Use caution and do not engage assailant in groups of smaller than one full squad.

Clan will be assaulting sector D-10-S's school in an effort to rid the area of drill clan and possible yellow knife clan operations. I recommend that the Hive search for this D-class assailant as a secondary objection during operations.


	4. Operation Ex3: Reason For Living

**Operation Ex3: Reason For Living**

Mr. Masuda's class the next morning started bright and early and with a timed-writing assignment. "I'd like a single, planned, well-thought paragraph, class on the following topic: What is your reason for living? Some have said that there is no great meaning to life beyond what one considers one's reason _for_ living." Mr. Masuda wrote the topic up on the board. "You have twenty minutes. Please use your tablet PC's—that way I can grade the papers during class and return them to you before the end of the period. You may begin."

I live because I hate. Before you complain that I'm foolish, listen. I do not hate _people_, whether it is by race, ability, or any other form of discrimination. Sure, I may be annoyed by certain people from time to time, but I hate _none_ of humanity. I _hate_ when something horrible happens, and all anyone does is stare and slink back in fear. I hate when the truth is distorted and lost. I hate the systems into which I am indoctrinated, because oftentimes they are defective and I hate not having a choice regardless of how perfect the system is. I hate resignation, when one gives up, says "it's no use" or "it can't be done, it's impossible". Even if it is impossible, I hate the idea of giving up. Without my hatred, I would have given up long, long ago. With it, I have a reason to live—I shall not die until I have righted this world from what ails it. My hatred gives me a goal, and it keeps me alive.

"It is an interesting socio-political statement, Miss Shinosaki, but are you sure you understood the concept of the assignment?" Jun clutched the school-issue tablet computer under her arm as she stood staring at her instructor. "I am well-aware of the assignment sir, and it is not a political statement. It's my philosophy on life. I have been faced with enough hardship that I have decided not to give in to my fears. I have given up on fear. I do not cower when threatened, instead I stand up and fight back. Had I not adopted this view, I would have probably _literally _died." Mr. Masuda blinked and slowly nodded. "I see. Thank you for clearing that up, Shinosaki. You're free to go. Do you need a pass to your next class?" "No, thank you." Jun quickly bowed and headed off to second period.

• • •

"Let's get going, Otani." Yuri tightened and secured the buckles on her rollerblades. The alien alert had sounded just over two minutes ago, and she had rushed out the door and ambled over to the locker room in a shed that had been temporarily set aside for the use of the Alien Party. Finished, Yuri got up, a little tipsy at first. "I'm ready, Monami." The third-year nodded. "Good. Catch." Yuri caught a lacrosse stick with her gloved hand. "Sendo's waiting outside."

"You ready Otani?" Sayuri Sendo stopped leaning on the side of the building and made a quick circle. "Yep." Monami gestured the girls forward and the two begin skating towards the school. "Otani, check the hallways, and cellcom us if anything comes up." The girl with rather snake-like hair then turned to Kasumi's understudy. "Sendo, go left. I'll take right. We'll sweep around the school."

Yuri was a bit nervous as she skated the ground floor of Hinode Junior High, carefully watching the shutters for any sign of movement. Most of the time, the aliens that arrived weren't very intelligent and thus couldn't open doors. Many other times, they could, or they simply opened them with brute force. She hoped that whatever the case, the aliens were still outside. She sighed her usual sigh and her mind started to drift when she noticed someone walking. "Um, hello?" The person in the hallway in front of her turned about-face. Yuri looked at the scarred face and quickly recognized the person. "Um, Miss Jun, what are you doing here? Isn't everyone supposed to be inside their classrooms?" Jun nodded. "I was going to the restroom when the alien alert went off, so I'm heading back now." "Oh, okay. Makes sense." Yuri's wrist mounted video cell phone took the opportunity to turn itself on. It was Monami. "Otani, we've found them. Come to the northeast side of the school." "I'm on my way." The screen flickered and went black. "Um, later." "Later." Yuri skated past Jun on her way to the door. Jun took the schoolbag she was holding by the top handle and returned it to her back.

When Yuri made it to the appointed spot, it was evident that the fighting was already over. Two large, heavily-built dog-like creatures lay still on the ground, green lines of blood running from their faces…or what passed for a face on the eyeless creatures. "You're too late, Yuri! The drams were dead when we got here. Look at this!" Sayuri pointed at the origin of the terminal wound, which, unlike most of what Yuri has seen, did not pass all the way through the creature the way an ordinary borg drill did. Sayuri wiped away the blood and shook her hand. There was a small, tube-like hole roughly the diameter of her pinky finger. "Wh…what happened?" Sayuri shrugged. "Dunno. Some sort of spike, maybe?" Monami rolled the corpse over and examined it in the sunlight. "You're not going to believe this, but I think this…is a gunshot wound."

• • •

It was shortly after ten when Jun left her home with her schoolbag and a medium-small corrugated cardboard box. She was dressed in her usual after school attire: cargo pants, a heavy-twill shirt, and a suede leather jacket of unusually heavy construction, accented by her ever-present gloves. Since the sunflower clan had not landed earlier in the day, they would probably land sometime in the next hour before hiding nearby and lying in wait for tomorrow morning when the students arrived. Jun walked past the sign announcing the school, and set her box of things next to the glass of the front doors, before leaning against the doors. Hinode was comfortably middle-class, and with a low crime rate, the school was devoid of security measures present in other wards of Tokyo. Jun waited patiently for the next twenty-eight minutes.

The familiar shape of a shooting star combined with a low rumble marked the impending landing of a spaceship. Jun watched the twinkling object for a while before noticing its flight path. She grabbed her box, and immediately went into a sprint, not stopping until she was around the concrete side of the school. The organic spaceship, jettisoning its heat shield and flaring before impact, slammed into the ground with its forespike a mere forty feet in front of the school. The impact broke the concrete paving, throwing chips of the material in all the directions. The debris-filled shockwave came whipping around the corner with what Jun knew to be the sound of a glass wall shattering. She dropped the box, grabbing a glass bottle out of it, before running back to the front of the school.

The portal on the front side of the ship opened, roughly ten feet off the ground, while the other ninety feet of spaceship lay above it. Jun methodically reached into her jacket pocket, removed a small hinged, steel lighter and touched it to the rag that was stuffed into the bottle. She waited, drawing her arm back before she hurled the Molotov cocktail into the still-simmering spaceship. Jun again heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by the sound of the thickened gasoline igniting. The girl then took off her schoolbag and unfastened and opened the flap. She took out a long cylinder. Then a much-longer slanted metallic box. And then she took the automatic pistol lying at the bottom of the bag, affixing the threaded silencer and the extended, twenty-five round box magazine to the their respective positions. The sound of gurgled shrieking emanated from the craft. Jun disengaged the top-mounted safety, the white dot being covered by the lever, revealing a red dot in its place. A blazing crab-like sunflower flew out of the portal, wailing its unnatural wail as the flames cracked it shell, having already igniting the organic "foliage" that ringed its sides. Jun kept her weapon trained on the alien, but it soon expired without further effort. Hearing no other sounds from the spaceship, Jun lowered her gun and went to retrieve her box, when three, successive, concussive blasts echoed through the street.

Jun aligned the tritium lines on the two bars of the back sights with the single bar on the front sight and carefully pulled the trigger. Her pistol had been configured for subsonic, hollow point rounds, which worked remarkably well against the sunflower clan. The round impacted the sunflower through the eye and pierced the creature's brain. Jun concentrated on the tingling feeling that illuminated her entire neck, focusing as her grandfather had taught her. She instinctively pivoted a half-turn, catching another sunflower. The first shot cracked the outer carapace, and the second shot hit the neck area, disabling the alien. Jun left it to die of blood loss and sensing the next group of aliens, made her way around the building.

The next group of sunflower aliens consisted of six members. She had precisely shot five of the six by the time the sixth one had had a chance to unhinge its neck and fire one of the cork-like structures connected to one of its roughly ten razor-sharp filament "lariats". The line caught her around the right forearm. It easily sliced and separated the sleeve of Jun's jacket, but did nothing to her arm. The alien, apparently unused to its weapon failing to instantly sever flesh and bone, stopped a moment in confusion. Jun pulled her arm backwards, yanking the alien towards her as she reached into her jacket with her left hand. She retrieved the oddly-colored silver-black knife from the sheath at her waist. The sunflower spoke plainly in a voice nearly identical to its fellows. "Fool. Drill clan weapons are useless against the sunflower clan." "Whoever said I was working with the drill clan? I'm a _human_." The knife had little trouble piercing the alien's invertebrate head or, a few seconds later, when Jun used it to break the now-dead sunflower's lariat off her arm, being very careful in doing so.

It wasn't until the sixth and final spaceship that an alien actually managed to catch Jun unawares, jumping from above and latching on to her forehead. It was met with an autoinjector to its neck area and soon liquefied. Jun wiped the sticky liquid mess away from her forehead and continued shooting. Her next shot actually caught a sunflower on the precipice of its spaceship's portal, knocking the instantly-dead alien back down into the ship. Within half a minute's time, the school grounds stood silent, and with it, all the tingling pricks on the back of her neck faded too. She sat down for a breather, examining her weapon of choice. It was a nine-millimeter Parabellum pistol designed to be as compact as possible. The silencer on the front was longer than the gun itself, and the extended magazine that stuck out the bottom was much longer than the standard ten round variety that would have kept flush with the weapon. The weapon was Italian, made by one of the oldest companies in the world. The company had been family-owned; ignoring the pressures to merge and incorporate that had arisen with the threat of lawsuits, the manufacturer had been privately owned since they had started casting cannons over five centuries ago. They were a perfect analog to Jun: if they could resist the pressure to incorporate, why couldn't humans do the same when it came to aliens? She quietly disassembled the sidearm and returned it to her bag.

Jun spent the next ten minutes piling all the sunflowers she could into a large, vaguely-shaped pyramid. She drenched the corpses with the small bottle of naphtha she had brought with her before sticking in several, large slow-burning campfire matches. She nestled her last Molotov cocktail firmly towards the top, and lit the wick. Jun gathered her cardboard box, empty except for the empty bottle of lighter fluid and her severed sleeve, and began walking towards home. She paused to admire her funeral pyre, smiled calmly, and walked home through the night air.


	5. Operation Ex4: Machina

**Operation Ex4: Machina**

"And now our top story this morning for the local news." Yuri Otani munched toast in her family's apartment. She had moved back with her mother and father, since with both her dorm mates absent from the country without replacements, she was reluctant to stay. Her parents, Masatoshi and Satoko, had relented, especially with her mother's opinion on the unwanted position of Alien Fighter. Though she was one year and one growth spurt older, character-wise, their daughter had changed and matured little. Satoko blamed the stress, and her spouse agreed.

An icon showing stylized pictures of two organic spaceships appeared above the words "Alien Attack?" on the television as the anchor continued. "A major alien attack on a local school last night was apparently stopped through unknown means. Police are reluctant to part with the details, though it is rumored to be the work of some sort of vigilantes. It happened in the neighborhood of Hinode-cho; where a record six spaceships landed on the grounds of the Hinode Junior High School. Police and fire crews responded to the scene after being a fire was reported at the school. They found two burnt spaceships and a rather massive stack of what appears to have alien carapaces arranged into pyre; almost all of the carcasses were burnt beyond recognition. We have no definite word at this point, but many of the bodies appear to have died before being burnt, and police have found traces of glass and lead in the remains. We have contacted the local branch of the Earth Defense Committee but as of this broadcast, they have not returned our calls; it is unknown who or what is responsible for stopping the attacks. Damage to the school is estimated at just over three million yen."

Yuri's mother said little. Her daughter looked at her, and somewhat hopefully asked, "Do you think they have cancelled school?" Satoko sighed. "Well, they didn't say anything about, and all the damage looks like a bunch of broken glass. But…I'm just trying to imagine what would have happened if those aliens had arrived today. _Could_ you have fought them?" Yuri thought for a moment, hesitant. As she opened her mouth to say "no" the doorbell rang. Yuri got up and opened the door. It was Monami. "Let's get going Yuri; you're going to be late." Yuri stood at the door until the thought registered, before hurrying towards her things. "Good morning, miss Komai." Monami bowed. "Good morning, ma'am." "Please try and look after my daughter." "I always do. Or least, I try." With that, Yuri appeared, slipped on her shoes, and was out the door with her senior.

• • •

It had been a rather harmless question. "_Would you like to go shopping after school?_" Saki had asked Jun the question, presumably in an effort to dull her friends' anxiety over actually interacting with the oddly scarred transfer student in a social setting. Jun, for reasons not entirely clear even to her, took the girl up on it. And thus, she had paid the price.

Jun sighed once. "How long are they going to take?" She adjusted the mountain packages she held, trying to even them out between her hands. Surprisingly, the bag handles were not cutting into her hands, though the sheer weight of them was doing numbers on her shoulders. "Shinosaki, how about here?" Jun mumbled a quick "sure" before she walked on. They had already exhausted the mall in Hinode and thus were now two subway stops away, pilfering the storefronts. "So, Jun, not much of a shopper?" "Well, Taka, not to this amount." As far as Jun could remember, the three other girls beside her and Saki answered to Yoshiko, Taka, and Kyoko, and their stamina for such exploits far exceeded her own. And thus, when she stopped actually looking at sale items, Jun had somehow been relegated to bag duty.

Finally, the Shinosaki girl spied an empty bench outside of the boutique where the quartet was currently scavenging. She slid her smoke-grey mono-strap backpack to one side and sat down with almost as much force as the bags she held. "Thanks for holding up." Jun looked up to see Saki in front of her, smiling. "Here. A reward for putting up with me and my friends." The girl reached into her back pocket and removed a small keychain of a standing woman. It was vaguely familiar "It's the Sho Kannon. I figured you could use a little bit of mercy right about now." Jun blinked but accepted the gift. "Thanks. I think."

The group of five took a slightly different way back to the subway station, since the line of storefronts that they had most recently passed through were oddly devoid of vending machines. They found a side street with a vending machine and several small parked cars. A forest butted up to the street, cordoned off by a high chain link fence topped with spiraled razor wire. Saki scrunched her eyes noticing the warning placard and the fact that the area was right next to a residential and shopping district. "Weird. Never been by here before." Kyoko and Yoshiko added, "nope" while Taka fed the drink machine. Jun set down the near-dozen bags she had been carrying and somewhat relaxed. It was then that she gagged and nearly collapsed forward.

The nerves in Jun's neck had taken that instant to all fire off simultaneously, causing the reflex. She knew what the insubstantial feeling was, and at this magnitude, something was practically screaming at her. Saki caught her as she feel. "Jun, are you okay?" Jun gasped as a few beads of sweat ran down her face. She weakly gave a "yeah" back before she got up and steadied herself. The only other people on the side-street, a couple at the upper definition of 'teenager', stared on at the short spectacle. Jun looked through the lovers and at the fence, but saw nothing. "You guys need to get going." Kyoko frowned. "Why?" Taka tossed Jun a water, which she promptly set on the ground. A dull, growling screech was followed by the fence buckling. The woman in front of the fence starting yell-whimpering, unable to vocalize a scream, as she gripped her significant other increasingly tighter. As the girls gaped upward, Jun failed to say "_That's why_" and instead only thought it.

Jun broke into a sprint, lowering her right arm and allowing her bag to swing forward. She unzipped it as she neared the fence, as if a mechanical action. She looked up, stopped, and rebounded off the face, tackling the couple as the fence collapsed toward the street. She grimaced, but a nearby car stopped the razor wire from reaching the back of her head. She had to the literally drag the man and woman out from under the fence. "Get out of here!" Jun retrieved a loaded magazine, tossing it left. Her left hand instinctively caught it and she pulled her pistol and instantly combined the pair. A gloved left hand yanked back the slide and chambered the first round before it screwed on the silencer. The giant worm slid over the remains of the fence and over the blue compact car, crushing it under several tons of invertebrate.

The alien was impressive by most standards. The beast was almost ten feet in diameter and probably sixty feet long. A flat, rounded head held flush light-sensing organs and a large, circular radula filled with vicious teeth lined the underside. The worm howled a deep wail that sounded vaguely like wind being forced through a small canyon. The first bullet that hit its 'eye' did little as it slid forward, rearing its fore end in the air. A quick glance behind her told Jun that her schoolmates had fled the immediate scene, but the college-age woman sat paralyzed on the ground, and her companion was reluctant to leave her. Jun faced him with an inhumanly stern countenance. "LEAVE." The man faintly nodded before complying.

The worm shifted its focus towards the woman and began closing the distance between them. Two more rounds hit the worm in the 'head' but did little to deter it, and overall had little effect. Jun lowered her pistol and ran forward, stopping above the young woman. Two shots to the inside of the radula caused a small stream of violet sanguine flood dripped out of the mouth, but the creature still paid little attention to its wounds. Jun flicked her pistol's safety and caught the lady under her right arm, hoisting her up thanks to the adrenaline that now rushed through the girl's system. After depositing the hysterical teenager a good distance away, she spun and faced and faced her prey. The worm still paid her little heed, so as she ran past it, she unzipped her backpack's front pocket and removed her knife. She plunged the silver-black fighting knife into the alien's rough outer skin. It stayed perfectly put. "_Perfect._" Jun stepped on the handle and catapulted herself on top of the rounded surface of the worm's 'back' before leaning down and yanking out the knife. Only the very tip of it held purple blood.

Jun momentarily gauged the internal armor of her target before she ran over the sandpaper-like surface of the skin towards the front of the worm, which was still slowly approaching the woman. Because of the tilt on the neck, she again used her knife as an improvised step. She braced her gloved hands against the rough skin, pulling herself above the curve of the 'head' before standing up. She was roughly three stories in the air. It was then the noticed the odd patch of skin at almost the exact middle of the front section of the animal. On a hunch, she armed her pistol and fired a single round into the translucent section. It immediately spurt purple blood that seemed to be mixed with a different metallic silver blood. Jun scowled and emptied the remaining nineteen nine-millimeter rounds into the soft spot.

The alien roared again, though the vocalization quickly turned to a whining gurgle as the worm quivered once before collapsing forward. Jun purposely fell forward and gripped the carapace as best she could as the beast hit the ground, twitched twice, and lay still. The girl with one eye stood up and grabbed her knife, tried her best to rub the blood off on the outer skin, and then stowed it along with her pistol in her backpack. She quickly hunted down the empty pieces of brass and tossed them into the small front pocket before she zipped it. The street was empty except for the woman and Jun's bottle of water, lying on its side and still unopened.

Shinosaki eyed the hapless barely twenty-something fumbling with a cell phone. Jun put the single strap of her bag over her back and walked up to the 'victim', and snatched the cell phone out of her hands. Jun's white-covered right hand quickly dialed "119" followed by the "send" button before handing it back to the woman. Jun passed a weak smile and a sigh before heading off towards the subway station. Twenty seconds later, the woman spoke up, her phone glued to her face. "Wh-where are we?" Jun turned and calmly replied, "The east border of the Forest of Spaceships."

• • •

"I don't believe it. I honestly don't." "Believe what?" Jun glanced at the rather consternated teacher. "Mr. Noda isn't going to believe this." "Believe what, ma'am?" "Nothing, you're free to go, I suppose." Jun's school day had started with having her jacket, schoolbag, all her belongings, and even her shoe locker searched. Satisfied, the woman held back a slight frown. "Well, thank you." Jun bowed, though she wasn't quite sure if thanking a person who had almost strip-searched her was the appropriate response. Jun knew what they were looking for…and they wouldn't find it. She had left her 'tools' at home. If Saki and her friends hadn't seen Jun draw her weapons, then the young couple certainly had. It was probably both.

During class, whispers were aboundingly present, and Jun was sure that it was not simply paranoia when her fellow students treated her more distantly than her first day of school. Between class, Jun a caught a hold of someone she recognized as Yoshiko from the previous day. She was hesitant to start talking but she relaxed (slightly) as she started talking. Her full name was Yoshiko Ito. Jun gave her best impression of a friendly smile as she walked down one of the second-floor corridors. Another group of girls squeezed closer to their lockers. "So, why is everyone edgy today?" Jun already knew the response. "_I know exactly why everyone is edgy._" "Why do you think, Shinosaki? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that you brought a gun to go shopping." Jun faked slight embarrassment. "Sorry, but would you have rather seen that man and woman be eaten?" Yoshiko. "Whatever. You're thinking with the wrong head. Later, weirdo." The last word was neither toned as an insult or as a joking remark—the tone was neutral in a tone that Jun often used herself. She honestly didn't know to respond, so she simply said nothing.

By the end of the school day, the slightly pensive Jun was sure that the rumors had permeated every corner of the school, from the gym to the computer labs. The gossip had actually not reached every willing ear yet, but it undoubtedly felt like it. One of the people it had reached was Miyu Tamaki, and thus, Yuri. "I don't get it. She only used it on the alien, right? Maybe she's an alien fighter, but she just doesn't use a borg. That makes sense, right?" Hopeful eyes glanced at Miyu, who gave a sighing smirk. "Interesting way to put it, but I think you're missing the point." "Isn't that the point?" "You're hopeless, Yuri." Otani shrugged. "Why should Jun be scary?"

Without really thinking about it, Yuri tracked down Shinosaki after the last bell. "Hey, um…Jun!" Jun turned to her right, allowing her good eye a clear field of view. "Oh…Otani, was it?" The alien fighter nodded. "Well…I heard…you hunt aliens, right?" Jun blinked. "_Everyone was so concerned about the gun. She's more concerned about the actual alien?_" "That's correct." "Are you some kind of alien fighter?" "Not really." Yuri perked up. "Have you considered joining this school's Alien Party? I'm sure we could use your help." Jun said nothing. "Okay…well, can I ask for help?" Jun turned her shoulders as she briefly glanced forward to keep from falling down the stairs she had just started descending. "How so?"

"Well, how do you do it?" Jun's face contorted in confusion. "Isn't that much…obvious?" "No, no…I mean…um…whenever I'm against aliens…I get scared and…tense up." Jun failed to realize how much of a colossal understatement it really was. The two had reached the first floor of the school. "Hmm…well, the best weapon that aliens have isn't claws or drills; it's _fear_. All you have to do remind yourself that you won't let fear rule you. Some aliens may think and talk, but they're still just animals. If you can make them afraid, there's nothing to worry about. And if that's not working, just use some other emotion. Be annoyed that they're taking your time, or be angry at them for hurting others. If you can try that, you won't have the time be afraid."

Jun opened her shoe locker and quickly switched footwear. As she stepped towards the still-broken glass front doors and into the din outside, Yuri, who had been attempting to internalize the advice, noticed. "Hey, wait!" Jun didn't hear her. Yuri reached out to Jun's right hand and grabbed it in an attempt to catch the girl's attention. It didn't. Instead, the thin white leather glove slid cleanly off Jun's right hand. "Ah." Jun stopped. A number of gasps arose from nearby students. She turned her head.

It was then the chorus started its revue. "That…can't be right." "Wh-what is that?" "Cool." "How does that even work?" "She's…a…" Jun turned around. In front of the interested and disgusted alike was Yuri, standing still, looking very confused and holding a white leather glove. Jun's eye caught sight of the glove. She followed the path of the menagerie's eye until she realized it led towards _her_. Jun looked down at her hand. It was metallic in a matte black with a touch of silver. Under her uniform jacket was a mechanical arm. The breath had been instantly drained from her. Jun turned and broke into a sprint, one narrow step away from tears, leaving a silent but wistful Yuri Otani holding the glove.


	6. Short Break 1: Packing Heat

**Short Break 1: Packing Heat**

Jun had been absent at school for the better part of a week, but on the next Monday, she quietly slipped into the flow of things, with another white glove covering her right hand. Few people noticed her, and those that did withheld any questions that they might have had. Jun sat in the classroom a few moments after the lunch break started, eyeing her chosen target.

As the girl got out of her seat, Class 1-B finally noticed the killer in its midst. Fifteen feet away from one of the corner of the room, she addressed the grinning boy with bleached hair. "You're Katashi Kondo, are you not?" Katashi looked up at the redhead and gulped. "Ye…yes." Jun smiled. "I've heard much about you. So, I figured, with your exploits, it's time to take you down." She reached across her blouse and into the inside pocket of her uniform jacket, holding it there.

The class made a collective gasp, holding its breath and wincing for the form of a black pistol that was sure to follow. Instead…Jun pulled out a small deck of brown-backed collectible playing cards and grinned sweetly. "You play _Ascension_, don't you? I've been looking for a good opponent." Half the class fell out of their chairs.

The hands were shuffled, cut, and dealt. The first round revealed that Katashi played mostly ebony, a "color" of card that focused on destruction, whereas Junko played cerulean, the color of subtle manipulation. Jun had drawn a weak hand, the result of a randomly bad shuffle, as she had some wonderful spells but nothing with to pay for them. Yet, Katashi did not instantly kill her; Jun made sure that it took the better part of ten minutes to finish her off.

"Heh heh…not bad, Shinosaki. Not bad. Looks like you got screwed on the deal, though." "Yeah." Since _Ascension_, like most collectible "battle" card games, was prone to such matters, games were always the best of out of three rounds. With his win nearly by default under his belt, Kondo smiled and settled in for the second round. Jun soundly decimated his forces with minimal effort for the next two rounds, leaving the twice-local tournament winner baffled.

There was still twelve minutes left in lunch, so Jun sat down next to Saki and began eating her bento box, with a smile on her face that would last through the end of the day.


	7. Operation Ex5: Elementary School 26

**Operation Ex5: Elementary School 26**

"Are you okay, Miss Megumi?" Mr. Nakamura stared at his fellow instructor. She gave back a questioning, "yes, why?" "Well, you've been staring at that computer screen for a good minute now, and I haven't seen you blink. Is there something _that_ interesting on it?" Megumi tapped the screen of the flat panel display. "No, just e-mail. Sorry, I think I've been a little out of it lately."

Nakamura turned his head, and after checking his watch, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. "Really? I was bit tired myself, but even I can't really zone out when Ishida is over there eating curry." He gestured towards the twenty-something woman sitting in the corner of the room, feet up, and attacking a large bowl of curry. Miss Ishida looked up, gave a quiet wave, and went back to her early dinner. "I mean, it's _Indian_ curry. That stuff is an assault on the nostrils." Megumi, for once, blinked. "Hmm…I can't smell it." Nakamura shrugged. "Really? Weird."

Her work for the day done, Megumi packed up her things, made sure her wig was on straight and walked out to the door, closing it behind her. It was then her legs decided to unexpectedly give way under her. The teacher-turned-counselor braced her self against the wall as a hand appeared at her side. She accepted it and was pulled back up to standing. "Are you alright, Hisakawa?" The owner of the hand was a mildly stern-faced man in his late forties, with a head of shortly-trimmed matte black hair. "Mr. Noda…yes."

"And how's your position going? I hope it's not too different for you." Megumi walked next to her new boss. "It's fine. I was a counselor before I ever trained with the Committee." "Well, good luck, then." Noda checked his silvered wristwatch before he continued. "Now, you must excuse me. I have a house call to make."

• • •

Principal Noda stared at the somewhat-small duplex in the middle of Hinode proper. "It doesn't make sense." The home was ordinary by the town's standards, with no external decorations, gaudy or otherwise. The brass name plate by the door quietly read "篠崎". The irritating thing was the house violated all of his pre-conceived notions involving previous "problem students". If anything, it was a little _too generic_. He swallowed, shrugged, and rang the bell.

He was met with a woman, comfortably in her forties with a long ponytail and tired yet pleasant face, with the first hint of facial creases. "Yes?" "I'm Minoru Noda. I had an appointment with you and your husband?" She quietly nodded. "Please, come in, I'm Kimiko." Noda stepped in and stepped out of his shoes before walking over the inner threshold. "I'm sorry, but Hitoshi's not home yet. It should be any minute, though. Would you mind waiting?" The principal shook his head. "That's fine."

Minoru Noda sat on a small couch across from his hostess. "Now, I understand you and your husband are Junko's parents, correct?" The woman shook her head. "I'm afraid not. We are her current guardians, though. Junko is our niece. Her parents, Hitoshi's older brother and our sister-in-law are…deceased." Noda's half-hardened expression lifted slightly. "I…see. I'm sorry for asking." Jun's aunt smiled. "It's fine." Noda habitually touched the side of his hair before he reached into his blazer and returned with a PDA. Kimiko Shinosaki blinked and turned her head slightly. "Forgive me for prying, but are you a symbiote?" Noda looked up from the miniscule touch screen. "I beg your pardon?" "You're a fused host to a…with a borg, am I correct?" Noda sternly nodded. Kimiko's face took on an expression of carefully masked anxiety. "Then I suggest you be brief when suggesting things with my husband. He has a much lower tolerance for such things than I." It was then that the front door took the opportune moment to open. "Dear, I'm…home." A salaryman with salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, and a concerned look on his face peered into the living room.

Hitoshi sat with a an ever so slightly annoyed look on his face as he sat down next to his wife, formal introductions having since been made. "So, Mr. Noda, what did you wish to discuss." "The behavior and habits of niece, Junko." Hitoshi's expression stayed fixed. "What about them?" "Well…we have reason to believe that Junko has been in the possession of an illegal weapon while on school grounds." "And do you have any proof of this?" Noda opened his mouth, and quickly closed it. "No. The school does not. Is Junko here? May I speak with her?" Kimiko shook her head. "She's out, currently." "May I ask where?" Hitoshi politely snapped back, "It's none of your business, sir. If you _must_ know, she's out with her friends." Noda was half-flustered and half-angry. "Mr. Shinosaki, I do not wish to insult you. However, your niece's behavior is rather inexcusable. We believe her to have attacked and _killed_…several aliens while on school grounds." "Did she endanger your students or the school's alien fighters?" "Not to our knowledge." "Then I don't see the problem, sir." Noda spoke up emphatically. "Surely, you don't condone this sort of violence?" Hitoshi sighed, closed his eyes, and prepared his words. "My niece and I don't quite see eye to eye, but we do share a relationship of mutual respect. If she had harmed or killed a human, I would be noticeably disturbed. Yet, you're telling me she's killed aliens, presumably before the school's Alien Party could. The outcome would have been the same. I don't see it as a problem."

Minoru was noticeably flustered. "I was gracious enough to allow her unusual choice of uniform without incident. However, this violent behavior _will not_ be tolerated." "This violent behavior that you have no evidence of? Sir, have you checked the girl's records and history of past schools?" "I have. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I have them…" Noda dug through a manila folder he had brought with him. "…right here." Hitoshi nodded. Kimiko added, "Sir, take a look at the topmost school on the list." Minoru recited, "Elementary School 26, Nagano Prefecture." Hitoshi slid forward on the couch cushion. "Sir, do you have time for an anecdote?"

Hitoshi cleared his throat as his wife got up to procure refreshments. "Junko grew up in Koumi in Nagano…small town. Elementary School 26 was the largest primary school in the rural Minamisaku district. Both she and her older brother, Hisoka attended school there. As I understand it, Hisoka was the only alien fighter at the school when he was in the sixth grade. The school was interesting in that, you're aware that the Drill clan is partnered the schools in the Tokyo area?" Minoru nodded. "I am." "Elementary School 26 was allied with the Yellow Knife clan." "How…how is that possible?" "Not the giant things…they have or had—I'm not sure—a type of small symbiote of their own…can't seem to remember the name to it, though it was something other than "borg". If I remember my late brother correctly, he said Hisoka's symbiote looked rather like a large pair of gloves with cylindrical nodules on it. Anyway…when Junko was in the second grade and her brother in the sixth…"

"_…one day, my nephew was out with the common cold, and thus, his Alien Party instructor had to cover for him_." Junko reached up to the sink and washed her hands. When she had asked the teacher to use the restroom, it was only a half-truth. While she did have to use it, part of it was that she simply needed a rest from the teasing at lunchtime, most of it at her red-brownish hair. While she sighed and composed herself for an afternoon of mathematics, there was a loud rumbling noise. The lights flashed, once, twice, and then went out altogether.

As Junko's eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed the light underneath the door flickering from movement on the other side of it. There was also a distinct, soft chittering sound that she couldn't quite place. As she crept forward to the door, there was a louder sound, that of something metal vibrating. The water pipe under the sink burst, the L-shaped piece of metal knocking her backwards, where she promptly struck her head on the side of the toilet stall and quickly lost consciousness.

When the girl awoke, the first thing she noticed was that she was cold…_and_ wet. Her dress and hair were soaking wet, though as she noticed the water had apparently been shut off and the drains in the room had taken care of the flooding, leaving just a cursory film of slickness across the floor. Junko got up, a bit stiff, and still in darkness, opened the door. Her eyes adjusted to the light, the hallway dimming back into view. There was an eerie silence afoot. Junko could hear the sound of wind gently blowing, when it was a cold enough day that most all of the school's windows were closed. There were also some distant, far-off sounds of human voices, of which she was unsure of, but they certainly sounded like yelling or screaming, with a possibility of wailing mixed in. She walked diagonally across the hallway and opened the door to class 2-E. "Hello?"

Junko was greeted by the body one of her classmates facedown on the floor in front of her. She couldn't make out quite who it was. As she walked towards him, her feet stepped in something. She looked down at the red liquid that looked strangely like cough syrup, although she had a funny feeling it wasn't. The body was facing away from her, so walked around and found she still couldn't identify the boy—he was missing his head entirely. She gasp and stood back. Junko's eyes slowly panned the room…desks were overturned, corpses strewn on the floor, papers and books tossed aside, and the windows broken. "_What did this? I know we're close to the mountains, but I thought tengu weren't supposed to be this mean_." The girl stood, quietly contemplating the surgical yet disorganized death that stood in what had very briefly before, been her classroom. Then the skittering sound came again, from the hallway. She crouched to the floor, and closed to the door to a crack, patiently watching.

The two beings who sidled by were definitely not bird-like, nor were they mountain oni. They were short to the ground, little more than a foot across, and looked like turtles…mixed with flowers on their edges, with glossy, gem-like eyes on short, compact necks. With their "foliage" on the edges of their curved shells they looked almost like…sunflowers. "So, is that all?" "I think so. The directorate says we have enough possible hosts." "What about that Yellow Knife woman?" "Too much trouble. Her mental resistance was a bit higher than we expected, and she actually resisted." "We could have used her." "Maybe." The two creatures talked in ordinary human tongues, but there was almost a metallic echo, a hardness to their voices. They passed by and Junko cautiously opened the door and made her back into the hall.

She had a feeling that these were like the aliens like her brother took care of. What had he said? That if she was in trouble, to find Mrs. Fukuhara, her brother's teacher? Junko starting briskly walking to the sixth grade hall; since the somewhat rural school had had more than enough room to expand and place all of its classes on a single floor. Within a few minutes, she had found what she knew to be Mrs. Fukuhara, though she was as dead as everyone else she had seen. The woman with black hair cut to a pageboy haircut was slumped against the hallway wall, legs and arms splayed. And as she followed the line of blood, her right arm and leg were actually the corridor, while deep lacerations covered what was left of her torso. "Mrs. Fukuhara!" Next to her was a bloodied pair of long, bumpy, almost flesh-like sandy brown long gauntlets that she recognized as her brother's Yellow Knife. Each of its halves was cut asunder, and each glove's eye was dark and closed. Even the sonic-projecting nodules had been twisted and sliced off of it.

Junko swallowed and held back a whimper. If the one adult who was supposed to protect her school was gone, who could save her? She stared at the three sets of lifeless, sliced remains momentarily before she made her decision. The aliens had missed her. Maybe she could run home on her own. Junko gave a quick prayer to her brother's teacher and ran off towards the school's southeast exit.

Junko was a bit disheartened when she saw the condition of the corner of the school. A giant, greenish object had crashed into the ground at the school's edge, collapsing the edge of the school into the rubble, including the two sets of double doors of the school's exit. She took a deep breath as her pulse quickened. She couldn't quite but a finger on it, but her brain had shifted gears and was currently trying to come up with the map for the half of the school she rarely visited. She then remembered an art room, a half-hallway away, there were doors inside the classroom that led directly outside—they used them for airing out the room or placing works out to dry. She ran up a short flight of four stairs used to adjust for the ground's slight slope.

The door was a little stuck, so the second grader put her shoulder into it and managed to force the door open. The art room, with its numerous high tables and stools, was as silent as the rest of the school, was oddly intact. It had a distinct lack of the dead people and broken windows and chairs that marked the rest of the school. "What should be done about this one? I thought we have enough hosts." "We do. Besides, this one's too young." "Let's get rid of it, then." A cold chill ran down Junko Shinosaki's spine. The voices, although slightly different from the ones she had heard, shared the metallic, business-like tone. She knew they were the same aliens from before. A small reaction had triggered inside her brain…should she run? The doors were across the room, and the room was pretty big. Should she do something else? Her hands found the legs of the all-metal stool that stood closest to her, and with adrenaline fueling her, she effortlessly lifted it and swung it around to her left.

The seat of the stool caught the cork-like barbs of the first alien, and with the momentum behind it, the steel stool slammed into the first sunflower's carapace and easily crushed it, squeezing out whatever strangely colored liquid passed for blood in the creature. Junko raised the stool to her right to bash the other alien. It was then that its barbed filament lines found her. The corklike weight of a line slid across her face, cutting it open before the barb on it finally lodged in her left eye. She screamed. The sunflower retracted the line back towards its unhinged neck. Junko's eye went with it. There was an enormous strain on the left side of her face momentarily that replaced with a soft burning as the left half of vision disappeared. Her mental focus left her. A second filament line wrapped around her left elbow, tightening for an instant before it quickly sliced the flesh and bone, severing the arm at that point. Junko gasped for breath and gave a slight, breathless whimper. Her severed left forearm, still gripping the stool, lost its function and tumbled to the floor. The girl lost her grip on the stool, and it slid out of her right hand. It fell sideways, with its lattice cracking the shell of the alien and stunning it. Junko, breathing heavily and steeped in her body's best attempts at natural painkillers, lifted her right foot forward and aligned it against the alien's short head before putting her foot down and shifting her weight to it. The sunflower gave a short, insectan screech and stopped moving.

Junko moved her right hand towards her face. There were large cuts on her chin, her ear, and a long, deep cut that run vertically through her left eye. She touched, and found in an odd sort of curiosity, that there wasn't a left eye there, just…a hole for one. As her normal senses started filtering back in, with them came the pain she had apparently been missing. Sensations of burning filled her face and the left side of her body. She winced and walked towards something white that she had noticed moments earlier. Junko walked to the far wall and turned the plastic hinge on the white box…it was a first aid kit.

Doing the best she could manage with one functioning arm, Junko pulled out a packet of a sand-like substance and several large bandages. Both had the word "hemostatic" on them, whatever that meant, though she remembered it had something to do with chemicals that stopped bleeding. She managed to tear open the packages on with her teeth and right hand, and sprinkled some of the powder on her arm and eye cavity. It burned slightly. Then she relaxed her facial muscles (to the extent she could) and pressed one of the large, square bandages over her eye socket. Adhesive on the borders kept it on. She did the same for the stump of a left elbow, and bent the flat bandage around it as best she could. They still really hurt, and they still were bleeding…just not _nearly_ as badly. Junko took a deep breath, and pushed open the door at the end of the art room. The cold winter air greeted her, although she was more worried about getting home than she was worried about finding her coat. Her head, despite its throbbing, knew the way home by heart.

• • •

Hitoshi paused to take a drink of water. "She eventually collapsed about a kilometer away from her parent's home, after walking six klicks by herself." Mr. Noda nodded. "Still, if an entire school was attacked and destroyed, I figured I would have heard about it on the news." Hitoshi's face gave an awkward smile. "Elementary schools Two and Six here in Tokyo were razed to the ground with great loss of life, including many of your colleagues. The news barely mentioned it. Interesting, isn't it? I also find it interesting that those…Sunflower aliens; their clan apparently has control of a good _fifth_ of the countryside in this nation. Funny that neither the government nor the GSDF have done little against what I certainly would call a 'foreign' invader." Noda's eyebrows cinched into a slight scowl. "Are you implying that their inaction is on purpose? The result of some sort of conspiracy?" Hitoshi shook his head, the grin widening. "No, no, sir. I'm merely presenting the information. I'm not drawing any conclusions. However, if I must say that if that's all you came to inform us about, we our having dinner soon and I'm sure to you have things to do."

"Wait, Mr. Shinosaki. With that anecdote of yours, I don't think we've finished discussing your niece." Hitoshi turned his head. "Really? What's left to discuss? Do you even know why she wears that strange combination of a uniform that she requested?" Minoru went to speak, and quickly realized that he didn't know. "I…I do not." "It's because my niece's appearance is startling to most people. She's as much carbon fiber and titanium as she is flesh and blood." "That…that's absurd. Every clinic and hospital these days has cell gel." Hitoshi shook his head. "You forget, sir. Bioregenerative medicine has only been around for the past few years. It wasn't an option in her case."

"Still, regardless of what's happened to her, she _cannot_ go around killing aliens like some foolish five year old, whether it's on my campus or not. I will _ensure_ that the authorities know about her!" Hitoshi concentrated his stare on the man across from him, and after a few seconds, added "Defending your own kind, aren't you?" "I beg your pardon?" "You're fused with a borg, Mr. Noda. I can _feel_ it; it's something that runs in my family. Tell me, sir. Tell me why even a white collar business such as mine gives incentives to its employees to fuse with borgs. Tell me why the medical profession is seeing unusually high levels of Parkinson's syndrome, young Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and other rarer neurological diseases, that before were too rare to be studied to any great extent, including some that can _normally_ only be inherited. Tell me why the country falters under a rather weak mélange of foreign invaders. Well, I can tell you one thing. I am some distance apart from my niece, and I don't _directly_ support her actions. However, she does what I cannot. Still, if you're up for it, feel free to try and get her kicked out of school. We'll home school her. Or, based on your tone earlier, try calling the police box and getting her arrested. I do not personally know the chief of Hinode's department, but I am quite aware that he lost his wife at the First Contact and his only son due to aliens. I think he _might_ be a _little_ sympathetic to a girl solving the problem on her own." "Are you mad? You're threatening me, after I came here to ask for your help? You're transferring your fears…I have done nothing to you!" "No, Mr. Noda. You _did not_ come to discuss. You came to _accuse_. _You_ have violated my family's privacy, my trust, and my time; you have much overstayed your welcome. Now, I suggest you and that animated toupee on your head leave my family's home on your own accord. I am not a violent man by nature. But if you do not, I swear on my brother's grave that you might have to leave here in a casket."

• • •

Jun had already disengaged the safety on her pistol and she had just now manually cocked the hammer, to ensure a lighter and more accurate trigger pull. "Please, please. I don't know what you're talking about." The teenager, wearing subdued colors stared at the man she had cornered in the back of a small alley, who was pushing into his late twenties. It was comfortably after dusk. "Oh, I think you do." The man shook his head. "Please, ma'am, I'm begging you! I just released from the hospital after a two year coma. I don't want to die after just after getting a second chance on life." Jun chuckled. "Oh, no, this isn't your second chance on life. You simply stole the first one." The man sidled, glancing intermittently. "Please, miss, I have no idea what you're talking about. I just want to go home to my wife…" "She isn't your wife. You aren't even Shiki Hakugi. He was beyond a human vegetable, with permanent damage to the cerebral cortex. You just _stole_ him, _Mercury_." The man's meek face hardened, as did his tone of voice. "So, you know about us, huh? Aren't you 'The Destroyer' everyone's talking about? I'm going to _love_ taking you down!" The man held his right hand out straight and charged. A silver liquid spread from underneath his fingernails and flowed into a dagger-like shape. Jun juggled the gun to her left hand and held up her bare right arm, devoid of gloves or long-sleeves, parrying the organic blade with the dark grey metal-like finish of her second prosthetic arm. Without saying a word, she fired into the man's chest.

A tingle of brass hit the concrete. "Ugh…" Shiki Hakugi fell backwards, his eyes wandering as red seeped from his chest. "Get out of my…" Shiki looked up with brightened eyes. "It's gone…I've managed to push that thing out of my mind. Miss, you need to get me to a hospital…I'm back!" Jun looked down at the man's hand, which still had a biological blade formed around it. She gave a tinge of a frown and shook her head. She then shot the man in the forehead. What was once Shiki Hakugi fell limp on top of a couple of trash bags. The head wound bled red, mixed with metallic silver. "I know from experience. There's not a cure for a Mercury. You can't come back." Jun clicked the safety on his pistol and slid it into her bag before she walked out of the alley and back towards home. She rolled her lips into a thinking frown. She was probably late for dinner.


	8. Operation Ex6: Mercury

**Operation Ex6: Mercury**

Megumi Hisakawa frowned at the long printout brought home from her doctor. Mainly because after an incredibly stressful conversation, "パーキンソン症候群" sat, polite and menacing, at the top of the page. After an uncomfortably terse explanation and history, the paper listed a series of bullet points, each with an uncomfortably strange and untranslated English term: Levodopa, Carbidopa, Benserazide, and Amantadine, with the last indented with an additional notation. Megumi sighed. A small portion of her mind gestured a consolation. "_At least I know why I always seem tired, or why my sense of smell is messed up._" "Borg, what do you think about…?" It promptly struck her that she didn't _have_ a borg to talk to anymore. The woman put her head down on the table next to her computer, and stared at her cell phone. Perhaps it was worth calling in sick tomorrow. After all, according to the friendly reminder on the doctor's printout, she was and would be.

• • •

"Jun?" Yoshiko Ito waved her wand in front of the redhead's face. "Wha? Huh?" Jun opened her eyes and found herself standing, arms crossed in the lobby of a karaoke box. Saki Rin pushed her black bangs out of her eyes. "Our room's ready, are you coming?" Jun blinked a few times. "Yeah, sure." Tadako Kondo grinned. "I can't believe you fell asleep standing up. It's kind of silly." Jun shrugged. "I was tired. I've been really busy lately." Saki nodded. "That's fair. Kyoko said she had some errands to run today, or otherwise she'd be with us, too." Saki chuckled. "And I still can't believe you're wearing a skirt, Jun." Jun shrugged her jacketed shoulders. "I've been known to do things like it. At least this one," she pointed at the long, dark blue skirt, "is long enough to cover over my knee." The quartet shuffled off around the corridors to the rented room, of which the four would later agree was as far across the building as possible.

Junko coughed and rubbed her throat. "Thanks, but I'll sit the rest out." Tadako sighed. "But we're only through three songs! We've got a good twenty-five minutes left." Yoshiko ran her hands through her shoulder-length black hair. "Something wrong, Jun?" "Well, my throat's giving me trouble. Talking's okay, but the singing is a bit hard on me." Tadako frowned. "Would a cough drop help?" "Not really. It's these." Jun's gloved right hand pointed at the deep scars below her chin and on the right side of her neck. "A few years back, I couldn't even talk for a few months. So I'm kinda glad I was able to get a few songs all the way through." Saki nodded. "Well, that's fine. Just be sure to note that if we're bad, it's Yoshiko's fault." "Hey!" Jun laughed and nodded.

A few stops and shops later, Jun once again found herself on the receiving and transporting end of her friends' purchases. She set the bags down and wiped the sweat from her forehead. "Aren't you hot in that jacket?" Jun shook her head at Saki. "Not really. It's fine." "No, it's not. You're _sweating_, and it's hot outside." "I can hold on to it for you if you like." "No thanks. I don't really want to…" It was then Tadako, who had snuck up beyond the Shinosaki girl, grabbed the cuffs of Jun's jacket and yanked down, pulling the jacket off entirely. Jun spoke a sound something akin to "Eep". Saki blinked. Yoshiko's eyes widened and she let out a rather small gasp. Shinosaki's left arm, from the elbow down, and her entire right arm consisted of a prosthetic with a carbon fiber-like shell in an odd metallic color, a mix of dulled off-black and a dull silver. Jun's face turned scarlet before going pale, because most of the blood in her face decided to promptly leave as she fell backwards.

• • •

"_Hey sis, want to know what you're getting for your birthday today?_" The newly ten-year old looked up at her now fourteen big brother. Hisoka smiled his friendly smile under his head of short, dark brown hair. "Ah, don't spoil it, brother." "Well, actually, I don't know. I do know that mom and dad have been working on something really cool for you for a while now, and they wanted it done by today." Junko blinked. "What were they making?" "A better arm." Junko looked down at her left arm, which from the elbow on was in a faux flesh-colored rubber, and despite her efforts, could barely pivot at the elbow and could do no more than open and close when she tried to move it like she had her real arm.

"There you are, kids. Your father was looking for you." Misaki Shinosaki stood in the doorway to the lab and office on the far side of the Shinosakis' new family house in Ueda, Nagano. Jun and Hisoka's mother was a stern-faced yet kind woman who currently had calm brown eyes and a white lab coat. "Come in, please." Jun followed her mother into her parents' work area. Half of the enormous room was filled what looked like a tinkerer's workshop, littered with small motors, batteries, armatures, and the occasional power tool; a computer in the middle of the chaos displayed a CAD program patiently. That would be her father, Takumi's side of the room. In retrospect, the other half of the family was painted a neutral, almost glaring white. Next to Misaki's computer was a large centrifuge (with the lid open), while a large, temperature and humidity-controlled glass-fronted cabinet lined the corner of the room. "Hey there, birthday girl!" Takumi's head appeared between two piles of mechanical refuse on the room's island.

Takumi smiled at his bright-eyed, short-haired daughter. She had of course, gone against her mother's wishes for a hairstyle in order to emulate her only sibling. Hisoka had inherited much of his manner from his father: a quick wit, an intuitive mind, and a warm grin, though thankfully he had thus far had his mother's eyes, and hadn't needed a pair of pair of thick glasses like his father.

"Now, you'll be getting your real presents later, but I wanted to at least show you this." Takumi cleared a shelf, and removed an arm…or half of one anyway. It was a left forearm and hand, the components half-exposed, but covered in a hard, dimpled carbon fiber shell instead of fake skin. "Look at this." He handed it over to his daughter, who grasped it in her natural right hand. Junko turned over the arm. The components were more complicated than the ones she had in current prosthetic left forearm, and she could overlapping pieces of carbon fiber shell on the hand, each joint tightly fitting against the next like a modern day suit of plate armor. "What's this for, dad?" "Oh, those. That's because once we get this put on you, you'll be able to move it in any direction, just like your real arm." "Wow." "What's even better is I'm almost done writing the computer software for it. I'm making a program that learns how you use the arm, so it will continue to be better and better." "That's nice."

"Don't forget the alloy, dear." Misaki looked up from her computer and stared at her husband. "Oh, right, here…" Takumi dug through several drawers and pulled out a small, thick bar of a funny looking metal. It was like the metal couldn't decide if it was near-black or some sort of silver. "Neat, isn't it? Here, hold it." Jun held the metal, which was much, _much_ lighter than she had anticipated. It was like holding a feather…a very, very hard and slightly flexible feather. She handed it to her older brother. "Cool. This stuff's like…titanium." Misaki dragged her chair over from her workstation. "Better than titanium, actually." She closed her eyes and grinned. Junko turned her head. "What is it, then?" "Well, Junko, you know those aliens called borgs?" "Uh huh. The ones that look like frogs with wings." "Yep. Well, they naturally produce this stuff in long, spiral strands to defend themselves. Except, this natural alloy they make stays almost a liquid despite the high temperature. This ingot is the same alloy, just permanently solidified. Which makes it even _harder_." "Huh. That's cool. What's it for?" Takumi rolled his eyes. "Well, your mother thinks carbon fiber is too dangerous for you, since pieces of it are sharp and it's prone to cracking and cracking under high strain. Well, we thought about titanium, which is a bit heavier, but strong and light. The problem with titanium is that it's brittle and very hard to work with. This stuff, however, is a bit _stronger_ than titanium, but it's more flexible and very easy to forge. So, your mother thinks that together, we could make more of it and use it to make the outer casing of your new arm." A low ding sounded from Takumi's computer. He turned to it, and switched programs. "Well, the compiler's done. We should be good. Say, Jun, I know you don't like hospitals, but would you like a new arm for your birthday?" "Sure!" Jun beamed.

The xenobiologist made her way up to the kitchen and found the sticky note with the number for the head of prosthetics surgery at Ueda's hospital. Between her own knowledge, and that of her husband, a prosthetics engineer, her daughter would be getting a better arm before the day was over. The cake though, would have to wait until tomorrow.

• • •

"Jun? Jun?" The girl awoke on a bench, feeling more than a bit woozy. The sight of her bare arms shocked her into full consciousness. Saki was standing in front of her. "Ah!" Jun curled up her legs and tried to cross her arms to little avail, and put her head on her room-temperature forearms. Tadako gave a meek smile and held up the jacket. "Sorry about that. I didn't think that…" Jun sniffled. "It's okay." Yoshiko grinned. "But, if you think about it, those arms are kinda cool!" Jun's grey eyes popped out from behind the off-black and silver arms. "How so?" "Well, you kinda look like Edward Elric from that old anime series. You could cosplay as him, or maybe make something up…you know, like his cousin or something." "Umm…okay. I'm not sure what that means."

"So, do they do anything special?" Jun blinked back at Tadako. "Define special." "Well, I don't know. Are you super strong or something?" Jun unhinged her arms and stared at her right palm, flexing the fingers, which curled at a noticeable, yet silent rate. "No. I mean, the case is a lot harder than skin, but the arms are about the same, except they run on batteries and I can't feel anything. And I think my right hand's out of alignment again." Yoshiko frowned. "Wait, you mean you have to plug your hand into the wall?" "No, it's like a cell phone cable." "Huh, I figured if you had automail, it wouldn't need batteries." "Well, mine do. They aren't 'automail', they're called myoelectric prosthetics. Listen, I'm not really comfortable talking about this. Can I have my jacket back?" Tadako held out the jacket. Jun accepted it and quickly donned it. She sighed as most of the red left her face. Saki reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of white gloves. "I believe these are yours." "Thanks."

Saki put a grin on her face and sat down on the bench besides the now-timid middle schooler. "So, I heard you weren't always in Hinode. What do you think of this distant little slice of Tokyo?" Jun tried a half-grin. "Well, I was from Nagano, out almost in the countryside. At first I figured that Tokyo would be this one huge block of city, but it's not. It's like a lot of little towns and cities stitched together; where one stops, another one begins. It's fine, I guess." Yoshiko put her hands on the back of the bench and began leaning towards it. "So, where in Nagano?" "Well, I was born in Koumi. Little town in the Minamisaku District. After the school…closed down, my family moved to Ueda, which I thought was a big city. Stayed there in a brand new house until…until my mom and dad…and brother…" Jun let out a cough, inhaled slightly, and began weeping. "My parents and…" Her head quivered and fell left onto Saki's shoulder. Saki just smiled slowly and hugged the girl back. "I'm sorry…I'm sorry…some days…some days I'm more broken than others." "It's okay."

• • •

The phone rang in its cradle on Megumi Hisakawa's low desk in her apartment in Hinode proper. "Moshi moshi." "Good evening." It was the voice of her former employer. "Good evening, Chisa." "Listen, I had some free time and I was surfing on the Earth Defense Strategic network. Some interesting rumors floating around the network, and thought you might want to know." The phone jiggled in Megumi's hands. "You know, I'm not _that_ cut off from the world." "I know. Listen to this. You're aware that the Sunflowers have been here for just over a year right?" "Yes, because our girls from last year dealt with a spaceship of them, right?" "Well, every since then, they've been losing numbers. Not enough to upset their control of the country, but according to the Defense Committee…in the Tokyo area…they've been losing _entire_ ships. Something like that happened a couple of months ago, just before you started working at Hinode." "I remember the short section on the news, if that's what you mean." "Yes, well, that's not the half of it. Most of the clans we Drills consider neutral have been attacked…little skirmishes here and there…the Medusa, the Lancers, and…a lot of the clanless unintelligent aliens…basically everyone but us and the Yellow Knife. The message boards have flying lately." "I'll bet."

"Here's the thing, Megumi. All the attacks happened in one of three ways: gunshot wounds, lacerations, and a strange form of apoptosis. Survivors, well…usually it's more along the lines of surveillance systems…report a human female with a pistol." Megumi sighed, and clutched the phone with both hands in an effort to keep it steady. "Sounds like a vigilante." "I'm almost tempted to agree, Megumi. Remember the Forest of Spaceships bordering my school?" "How could I not? Not the sort of place I like going into." "It's clean." Megumi frowned. "Run that by me again?" "It's clean. As of last month, it consisted solely of forest and decomposing corpses. Even the rockbills and giant worms were dead." "Damn…"

"That's where this gets interesting. It would take a full GSDF platoon or most of the fused borgs in west Tokyo to pull off something like that." "I see." Megumi acknowledged the statement while she reached for her headset and a pill container. "And some jockeys over at the Committee managed to hack into some Sunflower communications and somebody leaked it to the discussion…apparently the Sunflower blames this vigilante for the Forest of Spaceships as well." The counselor frowned. "Okay…okay…now _that's_ just plain ridiculous! What kind of person could pull something like that off? No one I know, that's for sure!"

Okada nodded on her end of the phone. "I would agree. Between the forest of spaceships and all the other incidents, if you assume them to be the work of the same person or group, there's at least six hundred and twenty confirmed deaths. The Sunflowers and a few other clans have nicknamed this person 'The Destroyer'. Quite poetic for beings with limited culture." "Sounds apt." "And with all the hearsay, everyone's making their own theories." Megumi could hear the sound of a mouse furiously clicking in the background. "So maybe this woman is some sort of government testbed, or maybe a fullspec from one of the clans with real intelligence…a rogue Mercury or something like that." Megumi pondered it over a glass of milk tea. "What if she's just an ordinary human? Not fused or anything?" Okada's end of the phone stayed quiet. "What? Did I hit a button?" "No…that's strange enough…it might just be true. Truth being stranger than fiction and all that." "So, why do you suppose this 'Destroyer' hasn't touched either the Drills or the Yellow Knife?" "Who knows? Maybe some sort of personal truce…probably something along the lines of 'she doesn't like us, she merely hates everyone else more'."

"One other thing to be wary of Megumi." "What's that?" "One of your students…do you know a Junko Shinosaki? I'm guessing she's a first year." "Not offhand…let me check." Megumi's flat-panel monitor hummed as it loaded up Hinode Middle School's faculty/student database. Hisakawa entered the name in hiragana. "There is a Jun Shinosaki at Hinode. According to this…high marks…no behavior problems or conduct problems…never seen her in my office. She's been out sick once…and wait…" "What did you find?" "This lists her as being disabled…limited mobility…my word. If this silly thing is right, this Shinosaki girl is missing both her arms, has something wrong with a knee, and is blind in one eye. I've seen her in the halls, though. She looked normal—two eyes, all four limbs when I saw her. Maybe she had a cell gel procedure and the records weren't changed." "Or maybe they're old injuries." "Pardon, Chisa?" "Cell gel doesn't work on tissue that's entirely healed over, and it adversely affects some people. Come to think of it…there was a prosthetics boom a while back. The stuff tanked when cell gel hit the market."

"So, why all the probing on a normal student, Chisa?" "Well, this worries me. There's a rather low-key notes on the Defense Committee main site…the Mercury clan has put a bounty on that poor girl's life. They want a first-year middle school student _murdered_. I seriously doubt any Drills will take it, but if word gets out to other clans, Junko might be in some serious trouble." "Those bastards. Why the hell do the Drill higher-ups get along with them?" "Because they're spin doctors like none other. Politics makes unusual bedfellows, Megumi. Ones neither of us…or for that matter…most of the clan condone."

• • •

"Big brother, I'm…home…" Junko stopped and blinked at the front door of her house. The door had been ripped off of its hinges and it was currently lying in the entryway. Hisoka would have normally been doing homework on the kitchen table, his usual after-school vigil, while mom and dad should have been in the back, working in the workshop, the sound of Takumi's rummaging and clanking echoing down the halls. But today, none of the familiar sounds were there. The house was oddly quiet, and it even smelled a bit off. "_Should I call the police? Have we been robbed?_" Junko frowned and looked around, that with the bus stop half a mile distant, the closest neighbors were a good two miles away.

So, the only option in the ten and a half year-old's mind was to get to the phone inside the house. She set her bag down by the front door and quietly crept towards the kitchen. There was still an absence of sound as walked into the room, and as the air conditioning system kicked in, she nearly leapt into the air. Which is precisely when she noticed the blood on the floor. Looking down, there were straight lines—streaks of red, mostly dried blood mixed with the printed outlines of someone's shoes. They led past the counter and into the open door to the workshop. Junko tried to calm her breathing and moved into the next room. At the other end of the room and the trail of blood was a pair of feet…all that was sticking out from behind the island at the center of the room. The girl swallowed and walked up to the island…where she promptly gasp and screamed.

There, prone and face down, was the body of Takumi Shinosaki. A large hole had been punctured through the center of his chest. His corpse was on top of a still woman in a crimson lab coat…who had nearly been sliced in half…Misaki. "_Dad…dad…dad…died…protecting mom. Or…or was he just holding her as he died?_" She let out a whimper. Why would someone want to kill her parents and her brother? There was a chink of glass fracturing from behind her.

Junko slowed turned around. At the corner adjacent to the kitchen door, was her older brother. His eyes were glazed over and empty and his head moved in jerky, abrupt movements to look at her. Hisoka's right hand fingertips were stained silver. Junko opened her mouth and said nothing.

Hisoka took a step forward…then a full stride…and broke into a sprint, yelling something incomprehensible. Junko ran to the side, and her brother kept going, ramming into their mother's specimen cabinet, shattering some of the glass. Hisoka stopped; he turned to the face the cabinet, grimaced, and punched one of the intact sections with his fist, before smashing his hand against the jagged edges. As he removed himself from the glass debris, his movements were more fluid and regular. The middle schooler's face and hand dripped blood, a combination of red and opaque silver as he began breathing heavily. "Junko…"

The girl stepped backwards, fumbling over her father's chair. "Stay…stay away from me!" Hisoka gasp, grimaced and then spoke in a tired tone. "It's not… I… Junko… there were these aliens here…and this one that looked like a silver ball touched me and…it. It got it into my head and took over. I can still…remember killing mom and dad…and I couldn't do anything to stop my body. The thing just pushed me to the back, and all I could do was watch. It's been learning my memories…my thoughts. It's getting smarter. I have a little bit of resistance to it…because I was an Alien Fighter…and the pain helps." Junko slunk backwards but said nothing.

Hisoka gasp and strained himself. "Please you need to get…away. It's trying to take over again…this mercury thing…it's working away around the ways I have to stop it." Junko shook her head. "I can't…I can't leave you, brother."

"Then kill me…please." "What?" "Kill me. I don't want to hurt you, but this thing wants to. I know it does. There's no way to stop it except if I die, it dies too. There's a pistol in the cabinet above dad's workstation. He never got the chance to use it. This alien doesn't know how to use it yet, but even now…it won't let me kill myself…I've been trying to do so off and on for a few hours." Junko sniffled and glanced towards her father's desk, still covered with the stripped-down and miscellaneous parts that he liked to tinker with for fun. "I don't think I…" Hisoka spoke up. "_Do it_. Please…just do that…promise me you'll do it."

"Take care of yourself, sis." Junko solemnly nodded. "Now please, hurry, it—." Hisoka twitched violently. His eyes went distant as a silver mercury-like substance flowed out of his fingernails. It quickly fused his right fingers together and formed a simple, long, sharp blade at the end. Junko reached for the cabinet and opened the door to it as the hybrid that was once Hisoka Shinosaki launched himself forward.

The blade came flashing downward and hit Junko in the right arm. She screamed and tried to move backwards. The mercury blade hit her again, and found her right shoulder blade and stopped as the edge bit into the skin. The girl reached for the grey silhouette of the gun just inside the cabinet door. A half-second later, as she grabbed the old, boxy pistol, the silver blade moved downward as it sliced through the bone. Junko Shinosaki's entire right arm fell freely to the ground as an all-too familiar intense burning spread throughout her body.

Junko gasped shallowly as she leveled the pistol. Hisoka's left arm shoved it aside as the other arm swiped at her again. Junko dodged backwards with her left leg. Her right leg was caught behind the caster of her father's swivel chair. The diagonal slash caught her in the trapped leg, shearing off her kneecap. Junko screamed, winced, and blinked. She leaned forward while Hisoka's arm followed the slash through. Her silver-black left forearm struck him in the chest at the bottom of the ribcage. The blow was enough to set the hybrid off balance, and it fell backwards over the debris on the floor.

Junko leveled the old Nambu at her adversary's forehead. The being looked up, slightly confused. The girl yanked the trigger, and her brother's body fell limp backwards. The pistol dropped to the floor as Junko grabbed the stump of her right shoulder with her metallic forefingers. She turned around slightly, and tried to walk towards the kitchen, through her right leg gave out almost immediately with a large cracking sound. She screamed and forced open her eyes. She had to reach the phone in the kitchen. Hisoka had told her to take care of herself, but…thoughts were turning over in her mind. She had a feeling she wouldn't be following that request.


End file.
